There is no return for death

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Movie
German title There is no return for death
Original title The Long Goodbye
Logo der tod knows no wiederkehr.png
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1973
length 112 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Robert Altman
script Raymond Chandler (based on the novel),
Leigh Brackett
production Jerry Bick ,
Elliott Kastner
music John Williams
camera Vilmos Zsigmond
cut Lou Lombardo
occupation

Death knows no return (original title: The Long Goodbye ) is an American film from 1973. The crime film , directed by Robert Altman, is a film adaptation of the novel The long Good-bye (German: The long farewell ) by Raymond Chandler . Elliott Gould plays the private detective Philip Marlowe , who is betrayed by a friend who turns out to be a murderer. Death knows no return is viewed both as a satire on film noir and as a swan song on it.

action

Philip Marlowe is a private investigator based in Los Angeles in the 1970s. One night he is visited by his friend Terry Lennox, who asks him to take him to Mexico because he is having problems with his wife Sylvia. Marlowe does him a favor and is arrested by police on his return to Los Angeles. Sylvia Lennox is dead and Marlowe is suspected of helping the alleged murderer Terry Lennox escape. After three days, Marlowe is released from prison: Terry Lennox had committed suicide in Mexico and had previously made a written confession that the case was now closed for the police.

After his release, Marlowe receives an assignment from Eileen Wade, who like the Lennox couple live in the exclusive Malibu Colony , to look for her husband, the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who is missing. Marlowe finds Wade in a rehab and brings him home. The gangster Marty Augustine seeks out Marlowe and threatens him: Terry Lennox has disappeared with $ 350,000 that Augustine gave him to take her across the border. Marlowe is supposed to find this money for Augustine. Marlowe pursues the gangster and his gang after they leave and discovers that they are going to the Malibu Colony to pay a visit to the Wades. Marlowe travels to Mexico, but finds no trace of the money.

A 5,000 dollar note changes hands several times in the film and in the book

Back in Los Angeles, Marlowe receives a letter from Terry Lennox in which he apologizes and which is accompanied by a $ 5,000 note - the "Madison portrait". So Lennox is apparently not dead. Marlowe visits the Wades and ends up in the middle of a party that is abruptly interrupted by the drunken Roger Wade. At the invitation of Eileen Wade, Marlowe stays at the house to eat with her. Meanwhile, Roger Wade commits suicide by drowning himself in the Pacific. Eileen Wade claims after Roger's death that he was the murderer of Sylvia Lennox, with whom he had a relationship.

Marty Augustine threatens Marlowe again, but lets go of him when suddenly the bag with the 350,000 US dollars reappears. The next day, the Wades' estate is deserted and is being prepared for a sale. Eileen Wade has left for Europe. Marlowe travels to Mexico again and, after bribing the officials with the $ 5,000 bill, learns that Lennox is actually still alive and has only faked his suicide with the help of local officials. Marlowe learns the whereabouts of Terry Lennox and goes to see him. Lennox admits that he killed his wife. He has a relationship with Eileen Wade and killed Sylvia the night Roger Wade found out about the relationship and went to Sylvia Lennox to tell her about it. He no longer needed Augustine's money, since he now has his rich girlfriend Eileen Wade. Lennox mocks Marlowe as a loser. Marlowe then shoots his friend Lennox, who has so betrayed and abused him. Liberated and happy, Marlowe leaves the crime scene and hardly notices Eileen Wade approaching him in a car.

History of origin

As early as 1965 there was interest in a film adaptation of Chandler's last not yet filmed Marlowe novel The long Good-Bye . The film rights were first with Warner and then went to MGM , for which Stirling Silliphant wrote a first script based on the novel. Even in this early version of the script, the action no longer took place in the 1940s, but in the present of the early 1970s. United Artists bought the script and decided to make the project a reality.

Leigh Brackett , the screenwriter who, together with William Faulkner, had written the screenplay for the Chandler film Dead Sleeping Tight by director Howard Hawks as early as 1946 , was commissioned to revise the script. She cut some minor characters and brought about significant changes compared to the novel.

After Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich were not available to direct, the project was transferred to Robert Altman. Altman hired Elliott Gould to play Marlowe. As part of the so-called Repertory Company , Gould belonged to Altman's ensemble of regular actors, whom he used again and again for his films. Decried as difficult by the film companies because of his neurotic behavior on the set, Gould's tendency to improvise suited Altman's working method, who repeatedly used the spontaneity of the actors as a stylistic device in his films.

Altman's friend from Bonanza times Dan Blocker was originally intended for the role of alcohol-addicted Roger Wade, who was on the verge of madness , but he died shortly before the shooting. Altman dedicated the film to Blocker. The film noir veteran Sterling Hayden stepped in to replace Blocker ; the director Mark Rydell played the gangster Augustine. Arnold Schwarzenegger , still listed as Arnold Strong in the cast list, can be seen in a brief appearance as a member of Augustine's gang . Ironically, the future governor of California made his appearance right after a scene in which Marlowe claims he was going to call Ronald Reagan , then governor.

Reception and aftermath

The theatrical release in March 1973 brought devastatingly poor attendance figures. It was advertised with a campaign that would have been more suited to a James Bond film. Altman explains, “The billboard featured Elliott with a cat on his shoulder, a smoking .45 ratchet in one hand and a cigarette in his mouth, with Nina the cunning blonde by his side. That didn't work at all. ”The audience was disappointed by the plot, which was perceived as poorly constructed, the allegedly inadequate character drawing of the characters and the apparently lacking faithfulness to the Chandler universe. Altman lived up to his reputation as a “genre killer”, which he had at least since McCabe & Mrs. Miller . The film was rushed out of theaters and re-released six months later with a new advertising campaign that emphasized more of the satirical aspects of the film, but without much better box-office success.

The criticism at the time did not spare the film with malice. Charles Champlin said, "You don't have to be a Raymond Chandler fan to find this movie unfortunate, but it helps." Altman's Marlowe is a "filthy, unshaven, half-educated, stupid fool who couldn't find a missing skyscraper, and not even that." got a job at a hot dog stand ”. Charles Gregory criticized the disrespectful use of the Marlowe myth in Film Quarterly . One can "not make a hero image an object of satire or even destroy it before it has been defined". Altman commented on the criticism of Gould's portrayal of Marlowe: “Some […] critics didn't like Elliott Gould playing Philip Marlowe. [...] Everyone said Elliott was not Marlowe and it wasn't true to the original, but what they really meant was that Elliott Gould wasn't Humphrey Bogart . "

From today's perspective, the criticism is much milder. Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz rate him in their lexicon “Films on TV” (1990) with 2½ out of 4 possible stars as “above average” and say: “Philip Marlowe as a curious Kasper who is more interested in the cat than in his assignment . Altman [...] changed the novel Chandler [...] beyond recognition and covered it with epic narration and the leveling behavior of contemporary society. " Roger Ebert concludes in 2006:" Death knows no return should not be the first film noir You are seeing her first Altman film. He achieves his greatest impact in the way he rebels against the genre and the way in which Altman undermines the requirements of all detective films, namely that the hero can assert himself against crime and [...] distinguish good from bad. The man of honor of 1953 is lost in the hazy narcissism of 1973 and is not doing well with it. "

Judges Jamie Gillies: "Unfortunately, due to an idiotic marketing strategy, this film never really got off the ground and remained an underrated classic [...] It may not be exactly like the novel, but you've never seen a Philip Marlowe like this."

With its method of transporting the plot structures of hard-boiled crime novels and film noir into the present, Death Knows No Return served as a model for films like The Big Lebowski .

On the critic's website “Rotten Tomatoes” the film achieved a score of 96/100 with 23 positive and one negative rating (as of April 24, 2013).

Film analysis

Chandler's novel: a Marlowe contrary to the clichés

Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, is considered to be the founder of the hard-boiled school, a genre of crime stories for which the type of hard-nosed detective is characteristic. Brutality is portrayed in a vivid and drastic way, but it is also often ironically broken. Next to Hammett's Sam Spade , Philip Marlowe was the most popular of the detective characters . Soon Hollywood was taking up the popular novels as material for feature films. Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in Dead Sleep in 1946 and in this film noir became the embodiment of the character on which the audience's expectations for further films were based.

In 1953, more than ten years after The Great Sleep , his first book portraying the character Marlowe, Chandler wrote The Long Farewell . By now a wave of copycats had flooded the market and the hard-boiled detective guy had become a cliché. Chandler realized that repeating Marlowe's character drawing would degenerate into a pose. His “new” Marlowe was therefore far less cynical, but more sentimental and characterized by almost chivalrous virtues: selflessly and without payment, he helps both his friend Lennox and Roger Wade. Chandler's literary agent Baumgarten was surprised by this "Christ-like" acting Marlowe.

Changes to the novel: the hardboiled detective in the 1970s

The scriptwriter Leigh Brackett realized from the start that the character Marlowe could not be seamlessly transplanted from the 1940s to the 1970s. She says: "Everything that was fresh and exciting about Philip Marlowe in the 1940s had degenerated into a cliché, exhausted by imitation and overuse". A man for whom honor and friendship were paramount would inevitably be a helpless fossil in the fraudulent society of southern California at the time the film was made.

Brackett therefore made a number of significant changes to the novel. If Eileen Wade was the murderer of Sylvia Lennox in the novel, Terry Lennox is now the murderer of his wife. The murder of Wade by his wife described in the novel was rewritten as Wade's suicide. The most serious change affects the end of the film: The fact that Marlowe ultimately shoots Lennox was not part of the novel. For Altman, however, this outcome of the film was so important that he obtained a contractual guarantee that no changes could be made to it during the production process. With the end, Altman wanted to make clear the high moral standards of Marlowe, for whom the betrayal by a friend weighs so heavily that he can only be atoned for by murder. The outbreak of violence should therefore be a defensive reaction Marlowe to the lying and deceiving society of Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Both the director and the screenwriter felt this change was necessary in order to remain true to the original character of Marlowe from the book, who was guided by high, chivalrous values. Brackett says, "I think Chandler would have liked Altman's version of The long Goodbye." Death knows no return is therefore not only, according to Altman, a “satire on film noir”, but rather also a final bow to a dying genre, the content of which no longer had a place in modern society. The original title of the film can thus be read both as indicative of the long farewell to Lennox, initially thought to be dead, and as a farewell to the film genre in question.

"Rip van Marlowe": the anachronistic hero

In the opening sequence you can see a sleeping Marlowe who is woken up by his hungry cat. Altman once called his hero "Rip van Marlowe", in reference to Washington Irving's literary figure Rip van Winkle , who wakes up after 20 years of sleep and can no longer cope with the environment around him. It is similar with Marlowe in the film: always wearing an old-fashioned black suit and tie, he drives in his 1949 Lincoln - Gould's private car - as if in a trance through a world that he does not understand and that no longer corresponds to his values.

Marlowe is a chain smoker who, in typical Altman manner - addicts, smokers and drinkers are among his preferred character repertoire - accepts with fatalistic equanimity that he is the only one in his environment indulging in this addiction. Gould creates the role of Marlowe as a caricature and sometimes acts like a joke or like a sad clown. During interrogation by the police, Marlowe, his face black with the ink from the fingerprinting, is a ridiculous and comical-looking parody of Al Jolson ; something that the cool Bogart-Marlowe would never have thought of. The first time Marlowe enters the Wades' house, he is attacked by the dog and cornered. It is Eileen Wade who saves him; the roles of the self-assured savior and the afflicted sensitive are reversed in an ironic way.

At Altman, Marlowe is the classic loser who doesn't even manage to fool his own cat when he tries to give her the wrong cat food. He's a loser, but, according to Altman, "a real loser, not the wrong winner Chandler made of him." At the same time, Gould also knows how to put a great deal of nonchalance into the role. His Marlowe, like the figure he embodies of the trapper in M * A * S * H , accepts all the twists and turns of fate so casually that he never loses his dignity.

Cinematic means

Camera and light: the California labyrinth

Altman and his cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond stage the locations Los Angeles and Malibu as glittering backdrops, often uncannily deserted and quiet. As later in The Player and Short Cuts , this deceptive calm of the scenes stands in contrast to the inner restlessness of the protagonists who act in them, which is often paired with malice. Altman tried to give the film a certain backward-looking look in homage to 1940s detective films: “I was concerned about the glaring light in Southern California and wanted to give the film the soft pastel look that you see on old postcards from the 1940s. That's why we bleached out the film afterwards [...], almost completely, I think. "

The camera work illustrates the hero's labyrinthine path through the thicket of action: The view is often obscured by objects or buildings in the picture or disturbed by light reflections. The camera is often positioned behind bushes and trees or behind railings or stairs. Some camera settings show what is happening inside buildings from the outside through the window or vice versa. Elements of the plot are sometimes only captured by looking in a mirror, for example in the scene when Marlowe is being interrogated by the police and the look through a one-way mirror simultaneously shows Marlowe and the reflecting faces of the policemen watching. The same applies to a scene in which the Wades quarrel in their house and the camera records the scene through the window, in which the Marlowe waiting on the beach is reflected.

As in the film noir films, the camera does not act rigidly at the hero's eye level, but performs complicated pans and movements or focuses action elements through eye-catching zooms . All of these elements contribute to the disorienting and unsettling mood of the film.

Sound and music: variations on a theme

In all of his films, Altman tries to create an authentic atmosphere by using a tone that is as realistic as possible. He also takes this to heart in Death Knows No Return ; only the sound of the sea in the scene in which Wade commits suicide is dramatically exaggerated.

At the beginning and at the end of the film the song Hooray for Hollywood can be heard to underline the satirical character of the film in relation to the film noir. Otherwise the score consists of the song The long Goodbye composed by John Williams , a melancholy melody that can be heard in many different variations and arrangements. It can be heard from car radios as background music in the supermarket and is interpreted as a funeral march by a Mexican mariachi band. Even the melody of the doorbell of the Wades estate consists of the first notes of the song. Altman similar uses the song as a thread of the film, as structuring variations on a theme of the recurring loudspeaker announcements in M * A * S * H .

Awards

Vilmos Zsigmond won the 1974 National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Camera .

DVD release

  • There is no return for death . MGM Home Entertainment 2008.

literature

Novel
Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Dieter Gaumann: Private eye and human friend - The literary film adaptation THE LONG GOODBYE. In: Thomas Klein, Thomas Koebner (ed.): Robert Altman - Farewell to the myth of America. Bender, Mainz 2006, ISBN 3-9806528-3-1 , pp. 144–155.
  2. ^ A b c d e G. Castelli, M. Marchesini: Robert Altman. 1978, pp. 45-53.
  3. ^ Judith M. Kass: An American innovator. In: PW Jansen, W. Schütte (Ed.): Robert Altman. 1981, p. 9.
  4. ↑ a b c D. Thompson (Ed.): Altman on Altman. 2006, pp. 75-81.
  5. ^ Adolf Heinzlmeier, Berndt Schulz in Lexicon "Films on TV". (Extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 822.
  6. ^ Film review by Roger Ebert
  7. ^ Review by Jamie Gillies on the pages of the Apollo Movie Guide ( Memento from September 15, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Michael Gruteser: The Laziest Boy in Town. In: Thomas Klein, Thomas Koebner (ed.): Robert Altman - Farewell to the myth of America. 2006, pp. 201-205.
  9. ^ A b Hans Günther Pflaum in: PW Jansen, W. Schütte (ed.): Robert Altman. 1981, pp. 104-109.
  10. ↑ a b c Thomas Koebner: From crazy and madhouses - The lonely fool In: Thomas Klein, Thomas Koebner (ed.): Robert Altman - Farewell to the myth of America. 2006, pp. 19-24.